Thursday, 15 April 2010

A vision delivered!

A while back I ran a team building event for an IT team. As a fun evening activity I got them to paint a picture representing their vision for the next few years. They weren't hugely impressed, but over a few beers painted a picture of USS Enterprise. (They said it was all they could paint, and was vaguely future and techie...)

Then they discovered that I had some post-it notes in speech-bubble shapes, and had great fun covering it with those, saying the kinds of things they'd like to be saying a few years hence.

We got together again recently, and I asked them to bring the picture. After some umming and erring, they remembered that it was languishing in someone's garage where it had been since the last event.

But to all our delight and astonishment, when we looked at the post-it comments, all but one of their aspirations had been delivered and the last one was work in progress. It was a great start to our team review.

And I am left wondering how important getting them to articulate those aspirations was, in terms of getting them to happen...